Editorial: an author's checklist for measure development and validation manuscripts.

A recent special issue of the Journal of Pediatric Psychology included papers focused on evidence-based assessment across several broad domains of assessment in pediatric psychology (e.g., adherence, pediatric pain, and quality of life). In one of these papers, Holmbeck et al. (2008) reviewed strengths and limitations of existing measures of psychosocial adjustment and psychopathology, concluding that many measures lacked supporting psychometric data (e.g., basic indices of reliability and validity) that would permit a complete evaluation of these measures. Given that measure development and validation papers are frequently published in JPP (Brown, 2007), it is important that we attend to guiding psychometric principles when developing and disseminating data on new measures to be employed with pediatric populations (Nunnally & Bernstein, 1994). Thus, the purpose of this paper is to present and describe a checklist for authors to use when submitting measure development papers to JPP. This checklist is included in the Appendix and is also included at the following link on the JPP website: